Wug test
Encyclopedia
The wug test is an experiment in linguistics
, created by Jean Berko Gleason
in 1958. It was designed as a way to investigate the acquisition of the plural
and other inflectional morpheme
s in English
-speaking children.
There are three plural allomorph
s in English:, the most general form (dogs, d), which appears after voiceless consonants (cats, k), which appears after sibilants (horses, ˈ).
The child is presented with a drawing of an unfamiliar creature, often blue and bird-like, and told, "This is a wug." (Such reasonable but nonsensical
words are sometimes called pseudoword
s.) Another wug is revealed, and the researcher says, "Now there are two of them. There are two...?" Children who have successfully acquired the allomorph /z/ of the plural morpheme will respond: wugs /wʌɡz/.
Very young children are baffled by the question and are unable to answer correctly, sometimes responding with "Two wug." Preschoolers aged 4 to 5 test best in dealing with /z/ after a voiced consonant, and generally say that there are two wugs, with a /z/; they do almost as well with the voiceless /s/. They do less well in dealing with /z/ in other environments such as after nasals, rhotics, and vowels. Children in the first year of primary school were almost fully competent with both /s/ and /z/. Both preschool and first-grade children dealt poorly with /ɨz/, giving the correct answer less than half the time, possibly because it occurs in the most restrictive context. Also, because the root of the test word often ended in /s/ in these cases, the children may have assumed that the word was already in its plural form. Even though the children were all able to produce the real plural "glasses" they generally responded two "tass" rather than two "tasses" when shown more than one nonsense creature called a "tass".
The Wug Test also includes questions that explore a child's understanding of verb conjugation and the possessive. Additional items were designed to investigate children's ability to handle common derivational morphemes such as the agentive -er (a man who "zibs" is a ....?). Very young children (preschoolers) form compounds rather than agentives with -er. (e.g. a man whose job is to "zib" is a "zibman"). A final series of questions called on the children to explain common compound words in their vocabulary ("Why is a birthday called a birthday?"). Young children also explain compound words in terms of their cultural, rather than linguistic, features (e.g. a birthday is called "birthday" because one receives presents).
The major finding of the wug test was that even very young children have already internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system that enable them to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms of words that they have never heard before. The test has been replicated many times, and it has proven very robust. It was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them.
The original Wug Test is reported in Gleason's article "The Child's Learning of English Morphology," Word 14:150-77 (1958).
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, created by Jean Berko Gleason
Jean Berko Gleason
Jean Berko Gleason is a Boston University psycholinguist best known for having created the Wug Test. The test, which was designed to investigate the manner in which children acquire grammatical understanding, was created in 1958...
in 1958. It was designed as a way to investigate the acquisition of the plural
Plural
In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...
and other inflectional morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
-speaking children.
There are three plural allomorph
Allomorph
In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme. The concept occurs when a unit of meaning can vary in sound without changing meaning. The term allomorph explains the comprehension of phonological variations for specific morphemes....
s in English:, the most general form (dogs, d), which appears after voiceless consonants (cats, k), which appears after sibilants (horses, ˈ).
The child is presented with a drawing of an unfamiliar creature, often blue and bird-like, and told, "This is a wug." (Such reasonable but nonsensical
Nonsense word
A nonsense word, unlike a sememe, may have no definition. If it can be pronounced according to a language's phonotactics, it is a logatome. Nonsense words are used in literature for poetic or humorous effect. Proper names of real or fictional entities are sometimes nonsense words.-See...
words are sometimes called pseudoword
Pseudoword
A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language , while in fact it is not part of the lexicon. Within linguistics, a pseudoword is defined specifically as respecting the phonotactic restrictions of a language...
s.) Another wug is revealed, and the researcher says, "Now there are two of them. There are two...?" Children who have successfully acquired the allomorph /z/ of the plural morpheme will respond: wugs /wʌɡz/.
Very young children are baffled by the question and are unable to answer correctly, sometimes responding with "Two wug." Preschoolers aged 4 to 5 test best in dealing with /z/ after a voiced consonant, and generally say that there are two wugs, with a /z/; they do almost as well with the voiceless /s/. They do less well in dealing with /z/ in other environments such as after nasals, rhotics, and vowels. Children in the first year of primary school were almost fully competent with both /s/ and /z/. Both preschool and first-grade children dealt poorly with /ɨz/, giving the correct answer less than half the time, possibly because it occurs in the most restrictive context. Also, because the root of the test word often ended in /s/ in these cases, the children may have assumed that the word was already in its plural form. Even though the children were all able to produce the real plural "glasses" they generally responded two "tass" rather than two "tasses" when shown more than one nonsense creature called a "tass".
The Wug Test also includes questions that explore a child's understanding of verb conjugation and the possessive. Additional items were designed to investigate children's ability to handle common derivational morphemes such as the agentive -er (a man who "zibs" is a ....?). Very young children (preschoolers) form compounds rather than agentives with -er. (e.g. a man whose job is to "zib" is a "zibman"). A final series of questions called on the children to explain common compound words in their vocabulary ("Why is a birthday called a birthday?"). Young children also explain compound words in terms of their cultural, rather than linguistic, features (e.g. a birthday is called "birthday" because one receives presents).
The major finding of the wug test was that even very young children have already internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system that enable them to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms of words that they have never heard before. The test has been replicated many times, and it has proven very robust. It was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them.
The original Wug Test is reported in Gleason's article "The Child's Learning of English Morphology," Word 14:150-77 (1958).